Assessment: A Questionnaire on Classroom Questions
In this self-assessment I reflect about how I use inquiry in my classes, to know if I am using questions well and how I can try to improve them and my own way to ask as well: To evaluate yourself on your effective use of questions, check the appropriate category for each statement. Add up your point. Score yourself as follows: 75 points (good) Excellent 80- 89 Very Good 70- 79 Good 60- 69 Fair Below 60 Needs improvement I am going to reflect about my results: Firstly, the staments that I consider I always do are: -I ask questions to encourage participation rather than to threaten, intimidate or accuse because I think that encouraging students to answer, even if they don't know the answer, is their best way to increase their confidence and capacity to look for knowledge. So intimidating them through too many questions or things that make them to feel insecure is not the way to help them. We have to be clear what to ask each of them, depending on the pupil that we are refering to, since each one has its own capacities and necessities. -I orient and prepare students for the questions I am going to ask: what I always do refering to that point is to do a pre-activity in which I prepare students to the topic we are going to work and give them time to discuss about it with other students as a way to make them feel more confident and prepare for the questions I am going to ask. -I vary my technique of identifying respondents: using different techniques to know about the specific abilities and characteristics of each student is essential to discover more about them and knowing how to guide them. -I use a variety of reinforcements to responses: in my classes, I always use positive reinforcement such as using gestures, comments, etc. but what I try to do is not showing them a personal point of view about the students' activities, since I consider given them this type of reinforcement is bad to the development of their own confidence and they got used to receiving a valuation from teachers. -I suspend judgment on responses, clarify and rephrase, probe and synthesize: I believe that clarifying and rephrase is essential to get a better understanding of the topic or question that I am doing, so for this reason, it is something that I always do in my classes. Regarding things that I do sometimes, I would choose: -I ask questions to find out what students know rather than what they don’t know: even if it is something that I try to do, sometimes I can't avoid to ask typical questions to know what they don't know as a way to have clear the concepts I have to focus on. However, I know that it is something that can be negative for their understanding, since they have to learn new things through what their previous knowledge. -I time my questions to coincide with student readiness to respond and I provide sufficient ‘wait time’ after I have asked a question: I know that having clear the time and giving them the enough time to think is essential to let them to get knowledge, but it is something that can be difficult in the day to day teaching process, since I am usually run out of time, so I don't always give them the enough time to develop a good answer and reflect about their own knowledge. So it is something that I have to try to improve. -I plan my questions as part of my class preparation and I ask divergent, open-ended questions that require reflection, analysis and evaluation by students: This two statements are something that I am starting to do now, since before I used to ask the questions that I used to consider accurate in each moment and I didn't prepare them a lot, for this reason, most of them weren't open-ended questions. But now, that I can see the importance of inquiry, I try to think of the best questions to use in each class and specific topic, especially open-ended questions that make students reflect about their own knowledge. In conclusion, I can see that an improvement is being done in my teaching process, thanks to the new knowledge that I am acquiring and being aware of it through self-assessment, but there are a lot of things that I have to continue improving.